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Necessary conditions represent the factors that cannot be compensated but must be present to aim the desired outcome; if a necessary condition is absent, the outcome will not exist. This logic of necessity causality differs from the conventional logic that has been evaluated by the methods drawing the lines “through the middle of the data” (e.g., regression and SEM). The authors argue that the empirical investigation of necessity causality has been largely ignored in hospitality and tourism literature although the notion of necessary causes for achieving certain outcomes is widespread throughout the studies. Thus, the authors introduce “necessary condition analysis” (NCA) as a suitable analytical method to identify necessary conditions in hospitality and tourism research. This chapter provides details on the underlying logic, key advantages, and an illustrative example of NCA. The chapter concludes by offering a few recommendations for future NCA applications in hospitality and tourism research.

In organizational research the object of study is often a process, that is, a complex of events and activities that unfolds over time. In this chapter we focus on temporally ordered configurations, which can be defined as those configurations in which conditions occur in a specific temporal order. We illustrate the aims, characteristics, and limitations of several approaches that have been proposed as tools for the analysis of temporal order. Our illustration involves an analysis of the “gestation activities” of nascent entrepreneurs, that is, persons involved in the creation of a new firm. We aim to identify temporal sequences of gestation activities that generate or allow a successful outcome of the gestation process, while an occurrence of the same activities in another temporal order will not generate or allow that outcome. First we discuss Event Structure Analysis and Optimal Matching and conclude that these approaches cannot provide the kind of analysis that we are aiming at in this chapter. Then we discuss Temporal Qualitative Comparative Analysis, for which our analysis points to technical limitations that constrain its application. We then present and discuss an alternative approach, Temporal Necessary Condition Analysis.